Little Salt couldn’t believe his eyes or his luck.
He found a whale’s tooth AND a conch shell at Beachwalker State Park!
It was a sperm whale's tooth, of this he was sure.
Of all the kinds of whales in the world, the sperm whale was his favorite.
The first picture he ever drew of a whale, before he visited the public library and checked out every book he could find about whales, before he memorized the field guide to whales, he drew a picture of how he thought a whale would look, and his picture was a sketch of a sperm whale with a gigantic head and a seasoned fluke.
He picked up the gigantic tooth.
It was a foot long, shaped like a cone, and made of ivory.
"This came from the lower jaw of a sperm whale," he thought, "Because they don't have any teeth in their upper jaws, only slots for the lower teeth to fit into.”
If he could somehow slice the tooth in half, it would show the age of the whale like the rings of a trunk show the age of a tree.
He gently laid the whale tooth beside him on the sand.
He picked up a shell with both of his hands.
By nature it was a mysterious, wonderful shell.
"What a shell," he thought.
It’s shape and color amazed him.
The shape was a common shape in nature.
It was formed by graphing the numbers 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13..., the Fibonacci numbers, a shape that reveals the golden ratio, phi, a special number approximately equal to 1.618 that appears many times in geometry, art and architecture.
The color was a common color in nature, too.
It was three shades of yellow.
It's spine was the bright yellow of the sun that very morning.
It's siphonal canal was the quiet yellow of the peaches he and his abuelo and his mamí picked off the trees in the orchards.
It's aperture was the deep yellow of sunflowers in a field.
He raised the shell to his tiny, listening ear.
Someone told him once that if you hold a conch shell to your ear then you can hear the ocean.
"I wonder if it's true," he thought.
"I can take it home to our gutted-out school bus and listen and see if I can bring the ocean with me wherever I go.
If I can, then, in a small way, I can bring whales with me."
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